Wednesday, June 29, 2011

I know my blog is generally about scrapbooking and other lighthearted fare but today I just need to write about something a little tougher.

I hate Cancer. Well obviously right? Breast cancer stole my mom from me at 54 years old. It is an evil, insidious disease that can destroy you before you even know it's there. Every day it seems I hear of someone else it's affected and it makes me feel very powerless. There are loads of sites dedicated to all the things you can do to prevent it but the bottom line is YOU CAN'T. Does a 3 year old have a chance to eat enough anti-oxidants to keep leukemia at bay? Don't think so.

I am just overwrought today. I can't believe this awful disease will affect 1 in 4 people. 1 in 4!!! Not great odds.Hug your kids, love your life and don't sweat the small stuff.Easier said than done I know but you can bet someone with cancer is fighting for the chance to love their life.Sorry for the downer. I am just furious today and had to let it out.

Friday, June 24, 2011

As scrapbookers obviously our whole world revolves around the photos we take and what we can do with them. A few years ago I discovered a FREE online photo management site owned by Google called Picasa. It is AWESOME. It has all the tools you need to tweak your pics and to do collages which give your pages a whole new look.

Here are some screenshots to show you what you can do:

When you load your pictures into Picasa you can start playing around with them simply by 'pinning' the images you want to use. If you look along the bottom you can see all the different things you can do ex: email, print, blog, make a movie, collage. Simply press what you want do with the selected pics and away you go.

There are several different collage options you can choose: grids, mosaics etc and you can play around with sizes such as cd cover, 12x12, digital frame sizes etc. It's super easy to add and remove photos and you can click and drag them to which part of the collage you want. You can use the collage as is on a layout or cut it up for smaller pics. I will oftern print two pics in a 5x7 size for a nice small image on a layout. These collages are also great to use on your blogs.

The beauty of Picasa is that it has all the photo editing tools too! You can fix red eye, remove blemishes, play with colour and you can add text which I used in the above collage. I journalled right on the pics with the name of the celebrity whose home it was. It's going to save me some time later when I use them on a layout.

This is just a quick look at a small area of Picasa. If you've been looking for a way to edit your photos believe me, this one is user friendly. Hey, I even figured it out!!

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Okay so where did May go? If the rest of the summer goes this quickly it'll be fall before we know it. I know, I know - bite my tongue!

For this month's design team we were each given collections from BoBunny. Needless to say we were all pretty excited as BoBunny offers really fun papers and cool embellishments. I was given the Blast Off line which I think is super adorable. I actually had a hard time picking which pics to use as I had so many that would have worked. This is what I came up with:

The 'mission possible' sticker made the perfect title for Holden's struggle with learning how to drink out of this cup. I love that the chipboard sheet had SO many pieces on it.

Even though this picture isn't clear I really liked the way it shows that Holden was always on the go and looking for trouble! I added googly eyes to the aliens and of course some stitching!

This diecut sheet is a really fun shape and I thought it would make a great backdrop for this picture of my brother and nephew being silly. I added some fine wire to mimic tethers to the ship from the monkeys but otherwise kept it simple.

It was super easy to make a card from this collection as there are so many fun elements and great little titles.

Don't forget to go and check out what all the other ladies did over on the TSF gallery!